


More Time

by saltysarah



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Fast and the Furious Series, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Wonder Woman (2017)
Genre: All my headcanons, Alternate Universe, Canonical Character Death, Crossover, F/F, F/M, Family Feels, Multi, Off-Screen Child Abuse, Polyamory, The Tiniest Inception Crossover, Tony is a babby, headcanons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-23
Updated: 2019-10-23
Packaged: 2020-12-30 21:16:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21146753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saltysarah/pseuds/saltysarah
Summary: Steve Trevor was Diana's introduction to mankind. You would think it could only get better (or worse) from there.





	More Time

After the war, Diana…_drifts._

Etta, dearest Etta, takes her under her wing when they are both still reeling from the effects and shows her where Steve’s tiny flat is located in Stockwell, with Etta herself bare minutes away at Kennington.

“It’s yours,” Etta tells her over her protests, “there’s…there’s no one else, anyway.” Her words dissolve into sobs, and Diana must take her into her arms. She doesn’t yet know how to turn away from someone’s pain, let alone the pain of someone so close and so dear. In this way she remembers and honours her lost sisters in Themyscira, to whom comfort had been as much a thoughtless extension of their bodies as their weapons.

“I couldn't, it’s the truth,” Diana confesses apologetically once Etta’s sobs have stifled to sniffles, “I don’t how to, anyway.”

Her words give Etta cause to dissolve into laughter, the first since the start of all this dreadful business. It is a relief to know that laughter is still possible.

“You haven’t met my husband, my Tully,” Etta says. “I’m one of the lucky ones; he’s been here in London all the time. My children - oh, my babbies, they’ll be back from the country soon, they must.” She sags with relief as if the words themselves drain her. “You’ll meet them,” Etta sighs, “and you’ll stay with us, for as long as you need to.”

_Until you can handle the reminders of the dead man whose flat they are standing in_, Etta does not say.

She doesn’t need to; just as thoughts of Etta’s children cripple Etta, thoughts of Steve cripple her.

The boys are just as much unmoored as her, their occupations as much a product of war and conflict as hers. Fighting in the war had been difficult enough; now they must all live past it.

She offers them the use of Steve’s flat even if they won’t hear of it. But a Scotsman, a French Arab, and a Native American will draw attention wherever they go, especially now that the war is over. They draw eyes as much as she does, if for entirely different reasons. Diana cannot punch the teeth out of everyone who looks at them wrong, but her fists certainly itch to try.

They return to the scene of the crime - the public bar that was the start of it all, where the patrons, despite their inebriation, know well enough to leave Diana and her companions alone. There she meets Etta’s Tully - “Theodore Candy,” he introduces himself as, just as wiry as Charlie and as redheaded as Etta.

“I’ve heard so much about you these past few weeks,” he says to all of them. “I’m honoured, ladies and gentlemen.” He brings out a bottle from the depths of his coat to the cheers of the boys. “I’ve been saving this in the hope this hell would end one day; now’s as good a time as any.”

The following week, Etta’s babies? babbies? return from the country, burnt nut-brown from the sun and each with an unmistakeable mop of red curls. The two younger are twins, identical except for how their eyes are differently coloured: the girl Jean - called Jeannie - has a right blue eye and a left brown eye; the boy Jerry has a left blue eye and a right brown eye. The eldest is a scowling boy who stands over his siblings with his chin raised and shoulders hunched. Watching him, Diana nods.

Yes, she thinks, she can work with this.

“You want to protect your siblings,” she says to him on their second day back. Julian, called Jules, has not once stopped scowling.

“What’s it to you?” he snaps.

“I can teach you how,” she says.

“You’re just a _girl,”_ he sneers.

Words like that are…a redundant observation to her, as her sex has never been a limitation - quite the opposite, in fact.

Yet another difference between this world and her beloved Themyscira.

“I am a woman,” she corrects, “and you will learn to protect your siblings, and then to teach them, so that they will be able to protect themselves.”

Fear flashes across his face for a moment.

“How d’you know they’ll be able to do it?” he demands.

“You must believe in them and trust in their abilities,” she says. “Do you love them?”

“Of course I do!” he shouts, almost on the verge of tears. “They were all I had out there.”

“Because you love them, you must believe in them," she tells him, "and learn to place your trust in them and their abilities. You cannot protect them forever, no matter how much you wish to.”

That is what she tells herself again and again, over and over through the tide of the years. Diana does what she can but she is a warrior, not a politician, and in the eyes of the mankind she is _just a girl._

Diana has only learnt strength in being _just a girl, _has never learnt to think otherwise in the thousands of years preceding her life in this world, and does not bother learning to do so now. Instead of the war rooms she goes to the ground, to the people who need help most; learns the lives of those on the street, the ones who do not care about her gender, only about her capacity to help. She does not think about the fact that they have no other choice.

In the afternoons she takes Jules out into Etta’s backyard after school and trains him. She has not had the experience of training anyone younger than her, let alone a child, and was given to believe that her own training was atypically harsh, even for Amazons. So she feels she is learning as much as Jules, who never again speaks about her being ‘just a girl’.

Surprisingly, Tully is the one who frets at the beginning, and they have words that culminate with Etta hollering while scrabbling for Diana’s sword.

Suffice to say, Etta wins that one.

“I want Jules to be able to protect his own,” Diana says quietly one evening, after the children are asleep. They still pile together in a single bed, unable to rest out of each other’s sight. “If it will give you peace of mind, you are more than welcome to join us.”

Tully remains unconvinced, that much is obvious. It changes soon after he sits in one on of her lessons with Jules.

“He…he can do all that?” Tully asks weakly, watching his eldest scale a tree with ease, flipping off its branches to land in a smooth roll on the soft English grass.

“This is nothing,” Diana dismisses. “I do not have a true armoury here, nor horses, nor bows and arrows nor spears.”

Tully blinks very hard.

“I can only teach him to defend from the hurts of the flesh,” she sighs. “The horrors of your modern warfare are something I neither know of nor care to know of, and I pray that neither will Jules.”

Chief is the first to leave them, 4 months on, on a ship that will sail across an ocean to the other side of the world.

“Home,” he calls it, and Diana of all people cannot begrudge him that. She sees him off at the port with a warm long hug, ignoring the scandalised gasps that erupt, and a promise to visit. She has time, after all.

Sammy is next, the roving look having returned to his eye.

“I’ll talk my way across the continent,” he tells her at the pub the night before he’s due to leave, “but keep an eye out at the cinema. You’ll see me there, one day.”

“I can’t wait,” she says truthfully, and presses kisses to his bearded cheeks. He pretends to faint and they both laugh, finding comfort in old habits. She holds Sammy’s hands tight and tells him the same thing she told Chief as they’d parted.

“If you need me, send for me, and I will come,” she promises. It is the least she can do for these men, her boys, _their _boys,_ their family._

The look in Sammy’s eye is fond but wise. “I would prefer to see you for other reasons, Diana,” he tells her. “I appreciate the thought, but will pray that the day never come.”

“Yes,” she agrees, “yes.”

Charlie never truly leaves, but that is not as good a thing as she wishes it was. He is in and out of an institution for years, and all they can do for him is to be there when he is aware enough of them to appreciate it.

All too soon, as the humans say, it falls to _shit._

* * *

It only takes 20 years for the spirit of Ares to consume mankind all over again. Diana is more aware of her powers now; she flies to the places that need help most, is the legend the Allies whisper to each other with hope-filled breaths, and she tries, by Artemis, she _tries_ to answer all their prayers. Failure is unacceptable; failure is inevitable.

Veld always lingers in the back of her mind, but this new war comes with a new set of horrors, and the first time she sees one of those giant ovens she throws herself at it and razes it to the _ground._

Diana roves the continent, seeing no distinction between Europe and Africa and Asia, language proving no barrier to her. She moves further and further east the longer the war draws on, and is embroiled in the Malayan peninsula when Little Boy falls.

She makes it to Japan just in time for Fat Man.

* * *

Chief takes one look at her and spreads his arms wide. She falls against his chest and weeps for days.

* * *

“His people,” she rasps. They are the first words she has spoken since - since Nagasaki.

His eyes tell her he understands. His tribe still number under a hundred and occupy a fraction of the lands they used to.

Of course the Japanese were not blameless, but-.

“It doesn’t justify this. _Nothing _justifies this.”

“The ends justify the means, don’t they?” Chief rumbles.

She inhales, practically feeling the air crackle on her skin. “How could you-”

And then stops at the look on his face.

He understands, of course he does.

“We were short of 2 rogue American pilots to commit heroic suicide,” he continues, and her mouth falls open.

“Did you just…”

Chief shrugs. “It worked the last time.”

Diana laughs. She laughs until she is hysterical, until she is crying, until she finally, _finally_, falls asleep.

* * *

If Diana were truly human, Etta would have knocked her clean off her feet with the force of her hug.

“I can’t believe you!” Etta howls. Diana has lived thousands of years, has fought at the fronts of both Great Wars, and still does not know how to confront the sheer force of nature in front of her.

“You’re gone for _months, _and the last I hear from you is a telegram from Melaka, saying you were heading to Japan. _Japan!”_

Etta slaps at her shoulders and chest, big hot tears spattering over them both. They are causing a scene in the middle of King’s Cross. Diana does not care.

Instead she stretches out her arms and crushes Etta close.

“I am sorry,” she whispers to her dearest, closest friend. “I never meant to hurt you so.”

“You need to _tell _people!” Etta wails. “We can’t all wait forever!”

It is the first time any of them have said anything about her godhood. In the 20-odd years since their first meeting, the children have grown, fashions have changed, and Etta’s once-ginger mane is now rippled with grey (Tully’s has long thinned beyond all mortal aid).

Diana alone remains untouched.

She and Etta hold hands all the way back to Kennington, breathing the same air and finding comfort in their mutual existence.

It is the middle of the day, and the flat that greets them is hollow and empty.

“I went to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and cleared as much rubble as I could. The radiation did not affect me, but it affected everything else. There was…there was nothing I could do.

“After that I went to the Americas, to Chief.” Diana smiles sadly at Etta’s confusion. “When we first met I asked him what he was doing so far from home. At the time he said he had no home, that his people’s lands and lifestyles had been taken from them. And when I asked by whom, he said…”

Understanding bleeds into Etta’s face.

“I needed to speak to someone who understood,” Diana whispers. “How could…how could the people who gave the world a man of such goodness and brightness continue to perform such atrocities?”

A tear leaks out of the corner of her eye.

“I’m so tired, Etta.

“I never thought I could be so tired.”

Etta looks shaken. Diana should have guessed, then. In her sorrow, she didn’t see.

“I’m sorry, Diana,” Etta tells her, clutching her hands to her chest. “I wanted to send you a telegram, but there wasn’t a forwarding address after Melaka.

“Charlie- he. The institution he was staying in was bombed. He didn’t make it.”

A soundless gasp parts her lips.

Just then, the front door nearly slams off its hinges. As weary as she is, it is still reflex to go for her lasso, to step in front of Etta and draw the brunt of the fire.

But it is a fire of a very different kind. It is Jules, her Jules of the quick hands and even quicker mind, deemed too valuable to the chessmasters in London to be sent abroad as Jerry hadbeen. Abruptly Diana remembers they have not heard from Jerry in long, long months.

“It’s true,” Jules breathes, interrupting her from her reverie. “You’re back. Aunt Diana, _you’re back!”_

The boy flings himself into her arms and she catches him with long-borne ease, relishing in the simple comfort of another living being. His cloud of ginger curls is as unchanged as when they first met, and it is into them that her tears fall.

She weeps, for the innocents who will die a death consigned to them by their ancestors’ enemies, for the extinction of cultures out of ignorant hatred, for their dear, dearly departed Charlie, and as always, she weeps for _him_.

It seems justified, somehow, as he was the origin of such tears to start. Without him, she would have remained content and carefree upon Themyscira, unaware of the world beyond their shores. Without him, she would never have known death, or tragedy, or discrimination, or hatred.

Without him, she would never have known mankind.

* * *

“There is someone I think you should meet,” Etta tells her one day, a week or so after her return. Her reunion with the rest of the Candys is thankfully less eventful, with Diana repeating her apologies and promising not to vanish off the face of the earth quite like that again.

They still have had no word from Jerry.

Diana smiles at her oldest friend. “Should I bring along my sword?”

Etta pretends to consider. “Maybe keep the bracers on,” she teases. “Agent Carter is a brilliant shot.”

Meeting Margaret Elizabeth is like looking into a mirror, distorted slightly.

“You do not like the name ‘Margaret Elizabeth’?” turns out to be her first question.

It makes Margaret Elizabeth laugh, a creaking, ill-used sound. Diana is glad; Margaret Elizabeth is beautiful when she laughs. She briefly considers mankind’s bizarre custom of heteronormativity and just as quickly discards it.

“Most people just call me ‘Peggy’,” is her reply. “‘Margaret Elizabeth’ is a bit of a mouthful, whichever way you look at it.”

“It suits you,” Diana says, stretching out a hand to touch a carefully set curl that has fallen over the other woman’s shoulder. “Margaret Elizabeth.”

“I must admit to some confusion,” Margaret Elizabeth says, smiling apologetically. Her generous mouth is painted the same colour as the poppies the English wore every November after the First War. Diana always thought it pointless, seeing as how mankind forgot its horrors a mere 2 decades later.

“I could never deny Etta anything; she’s a bit of a legend at the Home Office.”

“Etta is a dear friend,” Diana replies, and thinks about all their times together that make those words ring true. “She must know something about us both that we do not.”

Margaret Elizabeth laughs again, and the sound is just as beautiful the second time as it was the first. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Etta knew a lot more about either of us than we knew.”

“I recently told her that I was tired,” Diana offers. “Mankind is capable of such bright and beautiful things.”

Margaret Eliabeth’s generous mouth turns thin, her humour soured. “That you can still think that in days such as these is a bright and beautiful thing in and of itself.”

“No,” Diana returns, “I _know _mankind is capable of such incredible goodness. I have seen it with my eyes, held it in my arms,” and how they still ached for a phantom weight 20, almost 30 years gone.

“How then, is it also capable of- of-!”

Understanding bleeds into Margaret Elizabeth’s eyes much the same way it had bled into Etta’s before her, and Chief’s.

“And now we have a choice before us,” Margaret Elizabeth pronounces, “do we remember the good, or forget the ill?”

“Every time I think I understand mankind, something causes that understanding to slip further and further away,” she says. “I wish I could be surprised; right now I am merely weary.”

Margaret Elizabeth raises her hand to cover her eyes, very briefly. “The real surprise would be if you weren’t weary. Before, you were weary of rations, of curfew, of bombs, of war. And now, after, you are just weary of being weary. Where is the resolution? You would think the end of such a horrid thing would somehow be rung in with rather a lot more fanfare.”

Diana snorts at Margaret Elizabeth’s tone. Her thoughts echo Diana’s own, somewhat, if rather more disillusioned. Even if Diana has lost the patience for it, she has not lost faith in her ability to shame and browbeat these London chessmasters into action. The difference between them is that Margaret Elizabeth has. She has lost that expectation for the chessmasters to be better men, to be better _Man;_ nevertheless should the line in the sand be drawn she will go behind their backs and do what needs must anyway.

_Him._ Margaret Elizabeth reminds Diana of _him._

She swallows, before speaking.

“I had a friend whom I lost in the war. There was no choice. He took the plane - took the bombs - he flew it into the sky. I could only watch the fire wash over the horizon. He bought us time; he gave so many back their lives.”

Blood drains out of Margaret Elizabeth’s face as she speaks.

“They tell you there is always a choice. What they never tell you is that one of those choices is unmakeable. He took the plane and its bomb and sunk it into the ice. London could have been another Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Not that what was done to them was in any way right,” Margaret Elizabeth hurriedly assures her. “The war had to end,” she whispers to her open palms, bereft of offerings, “but at what cost?”

Diana knows the cost. She has seen it with her own eyes held it with her own two hands. She has felt the bomb’s effects wash over her harmlessly and knows with the certainty of the long-lived that mankind was not done dying yet.

“It is a cost that should not have been paid,” she says instead.

Slowly, Margaret Elizabeth meets her eyes. “His name was Steve Rogers.”

Diana's eyes burn but she will not let the tears fall. Not yet. Dry-eyed, she orders two glasses of their most potent alcohol and offers one to Margaret Elizabeth.

“Steve Trevor.”

It is the first time his name has passed her lips since.

Unexpectedly, Margaret Elizabeth giggles. “Are all Steves fools who should never be allowed within three metres of a plane? At least tell me yours was not blond and blue-eyed.”

“But he was!” she exclaims, laughing all the while. “He was! A pilot and a spy, and very much above average.”

“Good heavens. Mine was- well, he was meant to be a propaganda tool, a symbol of hope to the folks back home, but he was more.” Margaret Elizabeth sobers. “He was so much more.”

It is then that Diana smiles, because she is beginning to understand why Etta sent her to meet the beautiful and weary Margaret Elizabeth.

“They always are,” she says. “Many times I think the world did not deserve his- did not deserve _their _sacrifice. Does not deserve mine- or ours. Or Etta’s. But someone very wise once told me it is not what this world deserves that matters, but what I believe in. And I believe in Steve, in the choice that he made, and the value he placed upon his choice. In life he did not make my choices for me, and in death I will not make his choices for him.”

Margaret Elizabeth is the first to raise a glass. “To Steves, to our fools who should never have been let on an aircraft.”

Diana’s smile widens. “To Steves.” She clinks their glasses together, and they drink. Margaret Elizabeth leaves behind a red mark on the lip of hers.

…Diana wonders what red marks Margaret Elizabeth will leave on her.

* * *

There had been an incident, once, just after the war, at the estate of Hamilton Palace in Lanarkshire, Scotland. Of course, all of these were but meaningless words to her, but dearest Etta had taken one glance at the letter addressed to ‘Ms. Diana Prince’ and paled dramatically.

“What is a woman doing here?” a wizened man croaks at her from across a grand oak table. Diana ignores him with the ease of practice; by her side, Etta scurries ahead faster.

The man at the head of the table ignores him too, merely nods at her, his tiny round spectacles sliding further down his nose. Diana is seated closest to him, at his right, and Etta beside her.

“Ms. Prince,” he says. “It is good to finally meet you in person. Sir Patrick spoke of you fondly.”

Diana does not understand.

“Lewis, I say-!” the wizened man barks, and the man finally deigns to acknowledge him.

“Lord Dungrave, if you do not have respect for the living, pray you have respect for the dead. Ms. Prince is here, much as you are, for the reading of Sir Patrick’s will.”

There are other men apart from this Lord Dungrave who look mutinous at this news, but Diana does not care for them.

In the end, the man Lewis stands and holds up a single sheet of paper. The men’s faces sour further.

“This is the final will and testament of Sir Patrick Morgan, Duke Hamilton, being of sound mind and purpose.

“I bequeath my title, my lands, my funds, and my inheritance to Ms. Diana Prince, late of London. You are the last of us now, Sister. The dukedom I have to offer pales in comparison to your mother’s throne, but then again, such titles are but a fraction of what we once possessed. Do with it what you see fit.

“I have been well met by my father’s child.

“As for all the others who have summoned themselves at news of my death- well. I present my compliments to you all, and pray you keep your abnormally large noses out of my family’s business.”

Lewis looks up. “That is all.”

The outrage that erupts after Lewis’s words causes Etta to duck her head, which nearly lands the poor woman under the table. Diana frowns, unhappy to see Etta cowed this way.

“This is preposterous!” Lord Dungrave sputters. “That this- this _trollop_ could be Sir Patrick’s-!” He ends with an unintelligible noise of fury.

Diana does not know what a ‘trollop’ is, but she can guess.

She looks on either side of her, at Etta and Lewis sitting quietly under their browbeating, and asks, “How does one settle arguments like these?”

There is a broadsword hanging above the mantle behind Lewis. His eyes flicker there, Etta’s soon to follow, and Diana smiles. That smile alone stops many a fuming man in his tracks.

She rises to her feet, and the room is soundless except for the click of her boots against the slate floor. Plucking the broadsword from its cradle, she hefts it, humming contentedly at its balance. It could be better sharpened, but swords like these were never prized for their edges. She tests its weight and the give of her coat with a few casual swings, and her smile widens.

The men take a step back for every swing.

“Stake your claim,” Diana says, “any one of you.” She plunges the sword tip first into the slate, driving the blade a good 30cm deep before settling her hands comfortably on the pommel as she waits.

“Well?”

They flee.

Etta is doing a very poor job of holding back her glee while Lewis sighs, pulling at his receding hair.

“The cost of repairs for the floor, Ms. Prince…”

Diana smiles and unsheathes the broadsword cleanly before returning it to its perch.

“I do not need this,” she says, “any of this.”

Lewis sighs again. “Sir Patrick thought you might say that. I have been looking for buyers - difficult in this economy, you must understand. The state of the Hamilton coffers is not the best either, after generations of spendthrifts. Lending it to the navy as use for a hospital during the war has garnered some of its good name back, but that has little monetary value.”

Diana shook her head. “That means nothing to me.”

“I would recommend you keep the title,” Lewis says. “While it is now merely in name, it will open a fair number of doors to places most people would not like you to be.” There is a twinkle in his small eye. “I think the upper classes could do with a bit of upheaval, besides.”

She begins to suspect. “What are you, Lewis?”

He spreads his empty hands. “Merely a lawyer, Ms. Prince. I was previously Sir Patrick’s; perhaps I will be yours, now. But I would be a poor one if I could not infer a fair few things on my own.”

Diana nods carefully. She will not take his words at face value quite, but she can accept them, for now.

“We can hold an estate auction for the interior and demolish the buildings for raw materials. The land can be divided into smaller, more sellable parcels-.”

“But it’s such a waste!” Etta cries out, looking around them. “The art, the history, the _culture-!”_

Diana takes a second look, through Etta’s eyes this time, and can’t help but agree. This is neither her history nor her culture, but she can read the effort and the care that had built this collection all the way out here, even neglected as it was.

“Yes,” she murmurs, “yes.”

“But what else can we do about it?” Lewis shrugs.

A light begins to burn in Etta’s eyes. “Let me make some calls,” she says.

At the end of the month, Diana is left with a collection of photographs of a place she will never call home, but one generations before her have. She keeps them in their honour and instructs Lewis to do what he must with the rest.

She does not ever return there again.

* * *

Diana has always found children a curiosity and a marvel. On Themyscira there had been no other children beside her; despite that she had never wanted for companionship, not with Antiope, the Amazons, her mother. She knows now that children are not generally made of clay, and of the gargantuan effort placed upon a mother to bring such a little life into the world.

She does not know if she will ever have children of her own. She does not know if she can. She does not know what she wants the answer to be.

In the meantime she looks to Etta’s children, as much under her protection as Etta herself, Tully, Sammy, and Chief are. Jeannie and Jerry were each other’s long before they were anyone else’s and the twins are Jules’s, but Jules is hers. She feels his pain keenly when they finally receive the news about Jerry, Jules’s pain compounded by Jeannie’s. She may have a family of her own now, but a twin is irreplaceable.

(Diana remembers Achele, the first killed on the beach in Themyscira a lifetime ago, and wonders not without heartache what became of her twin, Acheme.)

“You told me once that I should have trusted them!” Jules rails at her that night, his eyes red from crying, his clothes rumpled. Jeannie has only just cried herself to sleep in the neighbouring room. “I trusted him to come to us when it got too much, and- _and-!”_

His fists beat futilely against her as she gathers him to her chest.

“You did no wrong, Jules,” she whispers. “You loved him, and trusted him.”

“Then _why?” _Jules’s face is wretched. “Why would he- to _me_\- _to Jeannie?”_

They will never know the answer, and the only person who can provide one is now beyond their reach.

Losing Jerry devastates them all, but Jeannie and Jules in particular, and the two remaining siblings cleave to each other like magnets in the chasm left by their brother’s death.

(Diana remembers Antiope- _Antiope. _Her aunt, her shield-sister, her tutor, her general, her world.Antiope had been everything Diana had wanted to be. She had meant so much to her at one point her disapproval had been utterly devastating, even more so than her mother’s. Too many things had happened in succession for her to properly mourn Antiope then, but Diana remembers. _Oh_, how she remembers, and cannot forget Menalippe, so abruptly left behind.)

Etta, Tully, and her see Jeannie and Jules’s ringlets curled together on a single pillow and remember the nights there used to be three heads nestled together.

Jeannie’s husband sees the two and thinks something far less innocent.

He breaks her arm.

Jules drives his nasal cartilage into his brain in a move Diana taught him when he had still been a child. This is the first time Jules has had cause to use that knowledge. In the back of her mind, Diana notes that Jules had always been an excellent student.

Jeannie is screaming into her hands to muffle the sound, a widow now, mother to a fatherless babby. Diana has not decided if she wants to be proud or disapproving, and wonders if she cannot be both.

Jeannie clings to her, the first time she has ever done anything of the sort.

“No one can ever know,” she begs, hugging her broken arm to her chest.

Dianna can already see Jules’s brain working a mile a minute. “You were attacked by a thief,” he tells Jeannie, “both of you. The thief hurt you, and he tried to fight back.” He doesn’t manage to control his sneer at the mention of his deceased brother-in-law. “It was a mistake, clearly. No one will question it.”

No one questions it.

Diana presses her lips to Jules’s forehead one last time, and leaves. She does not know it then, but it is the last time she will see the Candy children alive.

* * *

The salt in her nostrils is familiar, as is the crunch of sand beneath her sandal-clad feet, but her purpose here is quite unlike any other she’s performed in the past.

Sammy of the quick eyes and the quicker tongue, of the roguish smile and even more roguish exploits…today is his first red carpet, at the Cannes International Film Festival. Diana would not have missed this for the world.

They hold hands as they walk, partly for comfort, partly because his exploits are starting to catch up to him, and Diana presses a kiss to the back of his hand, reading his gratefulness in the squeeze of his fingers.

“It’s been too long,” he’d moaned as he’d met her at the station, and Diana had to remind herself to hold him _gently. _Sammy is older than Steve and Charlie will ever be, and Jerry, too, now that the mystery has finally been solved. As far as she knows, Chief is still in good health and she prays that it stays that way for a long time more.

“Look at you,” he’d said next, “you haven’t aged a day.” Then he’d winked. “I am frightened and at the same time aroused.”

She had sung her laughter to the wind.

* * *

When Stonewall happens, she goes; she must march. The memory of Menalippe’s anguished cry upon the beach of Themyscira will not let her rest otherwise. Again with mankind’s bizarre obsession with heterosexuality. There is so much of mankind to love; so many years on, she still does not understand.

She marches for Senator Acantha, who had blushed horribly but given her the first volume of Cleo’s treatises. She marches for Euboea, who had been the first who’d risked her mother's wrath and dared to share her furs. For Althea, from whom she learnt to scale a wall, much to her mother’s displeasure. For Venelea, whose beauty was unsurpassed and yet took no lover because her interests did not lie in that area. For Nephele, from whom she learnt strength and the comfort that came with companionship.

For Antiope and Menalippe, who had always been the cornerstones of her very _existence, _from whom she had learnt that trust did not come without fear of loss, and yet the fruits of a life well-lived was worth that risk anyway.

…really, mankind could be so bizarre about the most straightforward and pleasurable things.

* * *

In the January of 1970 a song is released in America by a band called Chairman of the Board. Music is just one more of the very many things to have changed over the years, not least of all fashion, civil rights, and technology. Diana loves to learn, is continually amazed by mankind’s ingenuity, more so from a remarkable little boy who will be born later that year, whom she does not yet know.

The song takes months to cross from America to England, but Diana does not hear it for a longer time still as she spends her summer wandering Europe with Sammy. Her dear friend continues to have a roving heart even after all these years, leaving trail after trail of besotted admirers behind him. Diana has done as she had promised and watched every last one of his films at the cinema, walking the red carpet with him when she could.

“How are you, Diana?” he asks, dark eyes still so kind.

“I am well,” she replies, and realises how much she means it.

It is 1970, more than half a century since the world of mankind has found her. She has lost so many, but in that same time she has also found so many more.

Sammy’s eyes crinkle, crow’s eyes deepening, and she must kiss him then, pressing her lips familiarly to either side of his mouth. He sighs gustily, knocking their foreheads together.

“I did not think this would be my life, all these years later,” Sammy confesses quietly.

“What did you think your life would be like?” she asks.

His eyes tick from side to side. He is unwilling to lie to her, she knows.

“I did not think I would still have one,” he admits. “There have been so many close calls over the years.” He pauses. “And still so many good things have happened in the same time.” His smile twists. “I am still not the right colour.”

“Mankind is so peculiar on this one matter.” It is time for her confession. “I still do not understand.” Her sisters had ranged every plausible shade of skin from the darkest ebony to the palest ivory, and they had fought, all the same. On the beach, they had died all the same, too. 

Sammy's smile softens, drawing Diana's mind back to the present. “I, for one, have always been grateful for that.”

“It is nothing that deserves your gratitude,” she says.

He thinks, before he speaks again. “Relief, then. It is a respite.”

“I will take that,” she says, smiling, clasping their hands together again.

After summer with Sammy she goes to Chief just as the leaves are beginning to turn. On Themyscira, there had been a thousand different shades of green. In these American forests, there are a thousand different colours fluttering down around her shoulders.

Chief’s tribe numbers in the hundreds now, and they are a tight and well-knit community. She knows them as well as she can, as well as they will let her. For as close as she is to Chief, she is still not one of them.

For as close as Chief is to her, he will never be an Amazon, for reasons aside from the obvious.

“There will never be anyone like you, Diana,” he tells her over a small, crackling campfire that reminds her of the night they first met.

“Sometimes I wish there would be.” This year, it seems, is one for confessions.

“In time,” Chief replies, and then immediately recants it. “No, that was insensitive. Forgive me.”

She doesn’t understand. “You only spoke the truth.” She has nothing but time.

“Time passes no differently for us than for you,” Chief counters. _‘“Age _is the difference between us. Since we first met we have all lived the same number of years, Diana. But I have aged. Sammy and Etta have aged. Our children have aged.

“You, Diana, have not.

“How many more must you see age before that time comes for you?”

It is a fear she has never voiced, the hurt still too deep and too raw despite, as Chief said, the same number of years.

She remembers 1970 for no other reason than a silly song that will not stop playing on the radio when she finally returns to England. The tune is catchy, the singer’s voice throbbing with emotion. Diana knows she will love it after the first listen.

Unfortunately, she listens a little too closely after that.

‘_Give me just a little more time/And our love will surely grow.’_

Diana drops to her knees when she finally understands.

_‘Life’s too short to make a mistake/Let’s think of each other and hesitate.’_

Her eye falls onto her watch face, ever present, ever ticking ever since she had received that token. Diana has carried it with her throughout the years, tucked close to her heart, against the skin of her breast.

_‘If we part our hearts won’t forget it/Years from now we’ll surely regret it.’_

Somehow, _somehow, _this song means everything to her, and yet nothing at the same time.

Their lives together had been too short for mistakes; they could not have hesitated even if they had wanted to. But _oh_, she wishes, how she _aches_ with her wishes.

She so dearly wishes they had had the opportunity to hesitate.

Instead they had parted, even if it was not a parting of their choosing, and her heart will not forget it. Despite the sting that still accompanies the memory even now, she cannot bring herself to forget it.

_‘We haven’t known each other too long/But the feeling I have is oh so strong.’_

The first tear lands on the collar of her shirt, the second on the hardwood floor. She loses track of the third.

_‘I know we can make it there’s no doubt/We owe it to ourselves to find out.’_

She _knows, _like the ache in her bones, she _knows._

Those words could have been said in his voice, so faint upon her ears now, it is more of a whisper from a dream.

“Give me just a little more time, and our love will surely grow.”

In the years that have passed, her love has only grown. He was not her first love, or even her first lover. The first man she took as lover, perhaps.

The only one, however, who has proved necessary.

It is as if a fount of sorrow has erupted from within, eating at her from the inside out.

“…ana! Diana!”

The lock on the door finally turns to reveal Etta, her curls long gone grey with age. She is warped and bent and requires a cane to walk, but the hands upon her still grip with vigour and strength.

“Etta,” Diana murmurs faintly. Her throat feels too raw to manage anything louder.

“I received a telegram of your flight details from Chief,” Etta says. “I knew you were back, I could hear you from outside, but I couldn’t reach the spare key.” Etta fixes her with a beady eye. “Couldn’t you keep it somewhere _lower?”_

Despite the black hole that has reopened in her heart, Diana still manages to laugh.

All at once Etta’s face folds into something wrinkled and concerned. “Oh, Diana,” she frets, “what’s happened?”

She hesitates, but eventually speaks. “Have you heard this song - ‘Give Me Just A Little More Time’?”

“Why, of course, it’s all over the Top of the Pops,” Etta exclaims.

“Give me just a little more time,” she whispers, “and our love will surely grow.”

She looks at Etta with wretched eyes. “It would have, I know it would, but we didn’t have time. Or rather he didn’t. I would have given it all my time, but he…he couldn’t.”

“Oh, Diana.”

For a heartbeat, Etta doesn't understand, but once she does, she looks just as wretched as she.

“I didn’t know- I mean, _of course_ I knew, but I didn’t know, that after all these years…”

Diana smiles, but it is one as full of sorrow as it is love.

“I do not think I could forget him even if I tried.” She holds Etta close, basks in the radiant warmth of this woman who has been her dearest friend through the years. “He gave me all of you.”

She draws in a deep breath and tries to resettle her fluctuating emotions. “Forgive me, Etta, you must have come calling for a reason. How may I help you?”

Etta flinches, curling into herself as if a porcupine, protecting her soft underbelly.

“Etta, Etta,” Diana says, worry surging through her veins. “What is it? Etta.”

She shudders, clenching her eyes tight. “It’s Jeannie,” Etta whispers, “and Jules.”

The names sent jolts of lightning down her spine. Now that Diana has brought her full focus to bear on the woman before her, she begins to notice the little things that she hadn’t before: Etta’s eyes are swollen and bloodshot; she’s lost a fair amount of weight, and there is pure white snaking through her grey curls.

“Etta,” she says. “Etta, what’s happened to the children? What’s happened to the babbies?”

So very softly, Etta begins to cry. Diana’s heart breaks at the sight.

“The babbies,” Etta whimpers, “oh, my babbies.”

Diana learns that afternoon that her babbies are dead.

* * *

It is Diana who calls for Sammy and Chief this time. Previously it had been Etta who had rung them for Charlie, but she is in no state to do so now.

Jules of the quick hands and the quicker mind, whose mind had been too quick after all. He had collapsed, very suddenly, and was dead by the time his body hit the floor. The autopsy revealed a blood clot in his brain. Diana will learn the word for it after: _aneurysm_.

And then Jeannie is the only sibling left, not that it matters for long. She has always been the youngest, the baby of the family, has never known loneliness with her twin and their overprotective older brother. She follows Jules in a matter of days.

The Candys are all gone in a matter of months; Etta could not have survived long without her babbies, nor would Diana have wished it upon her; likewise, Tully could not have survived long without his Etta.

If it is one thing Diana knows, it is that surviving takes bravery. Bravery had never been a question when it came to Etta, who had sat with her through 226 outfit changes upon their first meeting, who had pointed a sword she could barely lift at a German assassin and stopped him in his tracks, who had ruled the Home Office for long, glorious years.

Diana does not know the kind of bravery that is needed to survive burying your own children.

The plot where the Candys lie is very quickly very full, and really, who can blame them?

Sammy, who returned to see the Candys’ last journey, never leaves the English shores. His skin is paper-thin and threaded through with purple veins, and he can no longer walk unaided. His now-white beard is still luscious and well-groomed, and he maintains a full head of hair underneath his bright red fez.

Diana installs him in the Candys’ empty flat, and they spend his last days together in an unspoken vigil, awaiting the inevitable.

On the last night Sammy puts on the gramophone, and crackling French pours out onto the pavilion. The first leaves have just started to turn, and they have turned off all the lamps in the flat save a handful of tealights. He smiles at her, and extends his hand.

“Madamemoiselle, may I have this dance? S’il-vous-plaït?”

“Sammy,” she smiles back, “of course.”

He gathers her very gently into his arms, and they begin to sway, echoing a time long past.

“I am not afraid, you know,” he confides to her. “I never thought I could be happy as a soldier until I met you, and then I learnt to not be afraid. Even if it felt impossible at the time, I could always think of you.”

“What do you mean?” she asks.

“You redefine what the impossible is, Diana,” he says, his eyes crinkling until they are only thin, delicate folds of skin. “You _are _impossible, Diana. And yet here you are. And yet here _we _are.

“There remain battles that I have not won. But I’d like to think, the ones that matter- I won those.”

Diana thinks back through the time she has known Sammy of the bruised heart, rejected by his passions for something he could not control. Whose treatment of her has never changed even after he learnt what she could do, who she was, or how she came to be. Whose heart has stayed open throughout all these long years, despite everything this world has thrown at it.

“Et voila!” she says, smiling through her tears.

He tucks his head against her shoulder, presses one last smile to her skin. “Et voila,” he whispers, breathing out. He does not breathe in again.

Jeannie’s boy is fully grown now, an excavator in Africa. Diana has never met him.

He does not return for any of the funerals.

* * *

Children have always been to her a curiosity and a marvel. It is a curiosity and a _tragedy _that many of mankind's parents do not see it the same way.

Diana has not been a regular visitor to Margaret Elizabeth’s home over the years. Margaret Elizabeth has not been around for her to visit often, either; she had wed Percival Horatio Parker not long after their first meeting and moved across the ocean to Chief's America.

“Call me Parker,” he had introduced himself as, so Diana did. Call him Parker, that is.

He is not a pilot, nor blond and blue-eyed, and is in fact rather deathly afraid of planes and their heights. Parker is- _was_\- a sailor, one of the few at Dunkirk who had made it out largely intact. He no longer has a left big toe, but declares the matter rather trifling, in the grand scheme of things.

Parker is dark, made darker still by his long hours under the sun, with a brilliant smile and large hands that touch Margaret Elizabeth with such care. It does not mean that Diana will not break him if he hurts her, but the odds of that happening have decreased, somewhat.

Parker is, however, a spy.

Diana wonders if she should feel surprised at the fact that Margaret Elizabeth is one, too.

“No,” she tells Margaret Elizabeth before she can ask, because she can feel the question as it is coming. She glances sideways to meet Margaret Elizabeth’s gaze and wills her to read the answer Diana takes no care to hide.

“No,” she says again.

She thinks Margaret Elizabeth is someone used to fighting for her way. Regardless, Margaret Elizabeth will not win this one.

Besides, there are more important things like Peter and Pepper Parker, which, Etta had assured her years before, are absolutely terrible names for babbies. In turn, Margaret Elizabeth had returned that Parker’s sense of humour is merely more refined. Diana does not care, because _babbies!_

As babbies are wont to do, however, they grow up entirely too fast. Diana sees them in person only once before they have become their own people, with their own lives and their own families, independent of the one Margaret Elizabeth and Parker share with her on occasion.

Over the years, Diana has learnt of psychology too, and knows that it is probably not the wisest to move in with another family so soon after losing her own (again, and _again_, _and _**_again_**_), _but quite honestly, Diana does not care. Margaret Elizabeth had known both Etta and her, and Etta and her together, and while she does not know the full extent of their history, she knows enough.

Parker does not, but Parker knows Margaret Elizabeth, and Diana has come to know the man in turn. She is well pleased by the fact that through the years, Parker has not needed breaking even once.

(They have arguments and disagreements, of course. Diana recognises them enough as the signs of a healthy relationship, of open communication and a desire for understanding and empathy. She remembers with the fondness of hindsight the ringing in her ears when Antiope and Menalippe had truly gotten into it, and that was before they'd started pulling out swords and spears and knives and on one very memorable occasion, a battle axe.)

One day, however, she arrives at their home and finds a babby newly arrived in the sitting room, and cannot take her eyes off him.

Anthony Edward Stark is 4, Diana is told, and is as fair as his father is dark, except for his eyes. Diana has seen those eyes before, in Antiope’s face, in Menalippe’s, in her own mirror. In Jules’s face, in Margaret Elizabeth’s. They are the eyes of someone who has seen what happens to a victim, who has been a victim themselves, and has made the decision to never be a victim again.

Diana has fought in two great wars with the express hope that such a thing should never come to pass again.

Anthony Edward Stark is _4._

Diana abruptly arises for some much needed fresh air on the patio.

“He will need to learn to defend himself,” are the first words she says to Margaret Elizabeth and Parker when they return.

Margaret Elizabeth, wonderful being that she is, does not even blink. “You saw the bruises?”

“There are marks,” Diana says faintly, fingers digging into the balcony rail. She must take care not to break it. Inhaling deeply, she tries to relax. “Who are they from?”

Margaret Elizabeth does not look at her, is watching Anthony Edward unpack a shockingly comprehensive toolkit on the living room carpet. Parker puts an arm around her waist and answers Diana in her stead. “His father.”

She breaks the rail anyway.

Anthony Edward looks up, startled by the noise. Diana summons up a smile to reassure him but it is a poor likeness, and he can tell.

“I am sorry, Anthony Edward,” she says, stepping back into the room. “I am afraid I was just given some upsetting news.”

“What was it?” he asks, simple curiosity. He has learnt fear, but he has not learnt _to _fear. She prays he will never have to.

Diana crouches beside him and reaches out, sifting through his corn-coloured hair. Anthony Edward permits her the action, watching her with the same curiosity.

“I have just learnt that someone I trust has been hurting someone dear to me.” There could not be truer words. It is a parent, above all, whom she would entrust the care of a child. She cannot doubt the love a parent has for their child.

And this boy, so newly known, has already found a place in her heart.

His eyes flicker outside where Margaret Elizabeth still stands with Parker’s arm around her waist, their very own watchers, before flickering back to her.

“Did Pegasus tell you?”

“Peg- Pegasus?” she stammers, taken by surprise.

He points at Margaret Elizabeth. “Pegasus,” he says, as if that word should explain everything. “Why, whaddyou call her?”

“Margaret Elizabeth,” she says, and laughs at the face Anthony Edward pulls.

“Everyone else calls her ‘Peggy’,” he retorts.

“But I am not everyone else,” she replies.

Anthony Edward studies her intently for a long few moments. “I’m Tony,” he declares, “before you get it in your head to call me that disgusting thing.”

Her face falls. “But it is such a wonderful name,” she protests.

Anthony Edward- Tony, she supposes she must- shakes his head furiously. “Tony,” he insists. Then he pauses, and frowns. “What did you say your name was?”

“Diana, Princes-.” She bites her tongue just in time. “Diana Prince.”

“Princess suits you better,” he tells her seriously. He points. “Princess, and Pegasus.”

A sound behind her tells her Margaret Elizabeth has re-entered the room. Parker leaves the French doors open, leaving them awash with sunlight. “What stories are you telling now, Tony?” There is a smile in her voice, and when Diana turns to check- yes, there it is.

“Your lady pal here is a princess, Pegasus,” Tony says brashly, grin wide and teasing. Diana can’t help laughing herself.

“What does that make Parker?”

Tony shrugs. “Pops, obviously. Whaddyou think, Princess?”

“Princess or otherwise,” Margaret Elizabeth says, “I think she has an offer for you.”

Diana’s meets Tony’s intelligent gaze, and is immediately reminded of why she had originally come inside.

“I would like to teach you how to fight, Tony,” she says.

“You can fight?” She does not mind his skepticism. The trappings mankind persists in seeing women wear are immensely unsuitable for fighting.

“I will show you,” Diana says, “and then I will teach you.”

* * *

It takes her another 6 years to realise that Tony is meant to be elsewhere during the summers he spends with Margaret Elizabeth and Parker and, by extension, her.Tony’s gizmos and gadgets have only multiplied over the years, and Parker steps on one weekly, at the very least. They hear him every time.

“I almost boarded the right plane this time,” Tony is moaning as she comes through the door, groceries in hand. “Maldives, Pegasus, _Maldives.”_

“I’ve been there, and it’s really nothing to write home about,” Parker replies.

“Darling, you were there during the war,” Margaret Elizabeth says archly. “By the time we got anywhere, it was all nothing to write home about.”

Parker barks out a laugh, and then spots her.

“Diana!” he crows. “Did you get lox bagels? Tell me you got lox bagels. I’m starved.”

He descends upon her and her grocery bag like a swarm of locusts and kisses her in thanks, Tony hot on his heels. After the boys' impromptu raid, she moves to the kitchen counter where Margaret Elizabeth still sits, a teacup in hand.

“Boarded…the _right _plane?” she asks.

Margaret Elizabeth snorts and replaces her teacup without rattling its saucer.

“As if Howard would let Tony anywhere near me of his own volition.”

There is unmasked derision in her voice, the likes of which Diana has never heard before, even when Margaret Elizabeth speaks of unnamed chessmasters and their foolishness.

“Tony has been travelling?” Diana asks. “On his own, all this while?”

“It was a lot easier to ninja past everyone after you started teaching me your ninja stuff,” Tony mumbles, half a bagel sticking out of his mouth.

“That was not-”

That was not why I taught you what I did, she does not say. Tony is only 10, but he holds his own in conversations far beyond his years. Margaret Elizabeth asks for his advice in all seriousness. There is a word she hears Parker use sometimes, when Tony is out of earshot: _genius._

Tony straightens, caution bleeding into his eyes.

“Are we gonna have a problem, Princess?”

He is the only one to call her by her true title in all these years. He is the only one in this world to have ever meant it.

Slowly, Diana shakes her head. “No,” she eventually says, stretching her arms out toward him. He comes, so easily still, seating himself in her lap, resting his forehead against her shoulder. “I would miss you terribly if you were to go.”

Every summer he returns the look in his eyes lingers just a little longer, the look she had seen in Antiope’s eyes, in Jules’s eyes. It always lightens during his stay with them, and Diana cannot begrudge him that. She will not begrudge him that.

In the end, a call comes for her from the depths of Nevada. Chief is living on borrowed time. Diana cannot bother with farewells and even less with explanations or mortal arrangements. She flies there straight from the balcony of Margaret Elizabeth’s New York flat.

She does not see Tony again for a long, long time.

* * *

Her first glimpse of Chief after all these years takes her breath away. He cannot stand, can barely even sit, and his old familiar face is as full of creases as tree bark. His braids are as white as the snow she saw at Veld, studded with colourful beads and feathers and tied with leathers.

“Diana,” he rumbles, and falls into coughs.

She bites her lip and does nothing, because for all her powers, she cannot heal.

Instead, she looks around her, at the men and women gathered near, some of them with Chief’s eyes, his nose, his smile. This is a community, with a school down the road and a grocery store, and the houses here have open doors to all. Chief has had a life long-lived, well-lived, the warzone where they first met but a distant memory.

“Look at the home you’ve built, Chief,” she says, touching his hand.

His wife, a handsome woman with a twice-broken nose, laughs. It is a harsh, croaking sound through her nasal passage, but her good humour is evident. This is not the first time they have met; her name is Robyn Lake Walker. She sits in a wheelchair now, but Diana remembers running alongside her as she had swum the entire length of Moses Lake, years and years and years ago.

“He didn’t build it by himself,” Robyn says.

“There is very little we can do by ourselves,” Diana agrees.

“Shield!” the word rings only in her mind. “Diana, _shield!”_

First Menalippe, and then Steve, Sammy, and Chief himself.

“Amen to that,” Robyn says.

* * *

A beau of the time brings her to see ‘The Princess Bride’ its opening weekend, and she shakes the cinema walls with the strength of her cry.

_“Antiope!”_

Safe to say, she does not see that beau again.

Mankind has created such marvellous inventions over the years, not least of all the television, and now VHS tapes. She has no need to watch her expenses, her funds a result of good investment and foresight by Lewis, merely a lawyer when she first knew him, who had in the years to follow become the owner of his own firm and her advisor in legal matters beyond Etta’s expertise.

She is still a client of his eponymous firm, her current lawyer a sharp-eyed woman with the highest discretion and under strict instructions to never get too curious.

Diana goes out and procures a tape of ‘The Princess Bride’ immediately when it is released. She inserts it in the player with shaking hands and holds her breath as the opening credits start. Once a familiar face appears on-screen, Diana pauses it.

It is Antiope, and it is not.

Diana is unsure if Antiope had ever been as petulant and untested as the woman on her glass screen. She might have been her mother’s sister, but Antiope had never been a princess; she was the General, the fiercest warrior in the history of the Amazons. Hippolyta might have been the heart, but Antiope had been the arms.

Her first love, and her first loss.

Still, this is the closest Diana has come to seeing Antiope in the flesh in over 5 decades, other the back of her eyelids, plucked from her memories. There is her aunt - in the square jawline, the unforgiving set of her spine, her wry humour, and the pluck in her eyes.

Robin Wright is the actress’s name; Princess Buttercup the name of the character.

Antiope, her heart sings, _Antiope._

All of her first friends are dead to a one. All of her family, the Amazons who share her blood, are lost to a time she will never find again.

For the first time in a long time Diana finds herself well and truly alone.

She puts a hand to the glass screen of her television against the face of someone so dear and yet not, and weeps.

* * *

Diana does not remember much of the next few years. She packs up the Candys’ belongings - she is their sole beneficiary, and cannot help but wonder what will become of Jeannie’s boy.

She packs a bag and goes to Heathrow to take the first plane out. She travels the world, sees it in a light she never has despite all her years upon it. What had Margaret Elizabeth called it, all those years ago?

“Darling, you were there during the war. By the time we got anywhere, it was all nothing to write home about.”

Dunkirk is beautiful now, its beaches pristine. Veld is barely 60km away, and utterly unrecognisable. She makes her way southwards and finds herself in Mombasa months later, just in time to see Jeannie’s boy and his boy, burnt brown under the Kenyan sun with the trademark Tully sharp eyes and sharper mouth.

She continues on foot because she can, and it is liberating in its own way, in this age of super-fast cars and trains and aeroplanes. There is a letter awaiting her in Alexandria, distracting her from uncovering the mystery of the city’s eponymous library.

A contact awaits her in Tel Aviv. Officially, the Mossad’s Refusenik operation is over; Perma-36 has shut its gates for good. Unofficially, there is an underground chain of forced labour camps that persist in Siberia.

Her mission, should she choose to accept, is to break the chain. The letter is unsigned, but for a single press of a red-lipped mouth to the bottom of the page.

Diana presses her own lips to the mark and goes. Spies, honestly. Did she ever have a choice?

* * *

Diana abruptly gasps awake. At her side, someone stirs.

“…sele? ‘sele, you okay?”

There is a hand on her arm, and she pulls back her fist to strike…only to stop.

There is a man in her bed. He is still half-asleep, eyes blinking groggily, and is no threat to her in his unclothed state. Diana knows this man.

But he does not know Diana.

“I’m fine,” she murmurs, sliding back down into the pillows and the awaiting embrace. “It was only a dream.”

Smooth lips press against her shoulder as he tries to blanket her with his warmth. “Y’wanna talk about it?”

She cannot help chuckling. Teasingly she pokes him on the nose and watches his face wrinkle. “You are barely awake.”

“I c’n stay awake,” Han grumbles. She can feel his pout upon her skin.

Diana lets herself relax, lifting her hand again, but only to softly pet his hair. It has gotten longer and shaggier over the years. “Go to sleep,” she tells him. “We can talk in the morning.”

Han mumbles something - it could have been an agreement or a protest, she will never know - and obeys.

Diana stares up at the blank ceiling of their flat in Hong Kong and remembers_._

She is Gisele Yashar in this life, to the man beside her, to their merry band of international- they do not indulge in frivolous thievery, but yes, they are all thieves. Diana supposes this makes her one as well. She has come such a long way from being outraged by _lying._

Gisele Yashar is a guise the Mossad had created for her, for her to go where Diana Prince could not. No one told her that guises once worn could be so difficult to remove. Lying here in this bed, she still feels…_mortal. _It is a singular experience. Diana has never been afraid of death, but as Gisele Yashar, she thinks she might be.

She had promised Han that they would talk in the morning, but they get distracted. Or rather, Han distracts her. The sun slots in her eyes from a gap in the curtains as he kisses his way down her front, pausing to nibble on her navel. His hair tickles, and Diana must laugh.

“Clearly, I’m not doing it right,” Han grumbles. She laughs harder; he moves lower; she stops laughing. Han’s hair is neither too long nor too short, she decides. It is just the right length to wrap her fingers in as she pulls his mouth to where she most wants it.

Han eventually surfaces when she is trembling too hard to pull anymore, his chin soaked and a grin splitting his face. Diana rolls her eyes and yanks him down for a kiss.

“G’morning,” he breathes just as their lips meet, and she cannot help but smile alongside him. She faintly remembers a question about what mankind did in times of peace and wonders if this is not it. She and Han have only had 6 months together, a mere drop in the ocean in the grand scheme of things, but she does not doubt the way he looks at her, how he laughs at her Cantonese during dinner only to butcher his own order, how everything in this flat has been picked by either of them or the 2 of them together.

He puts his face between her breasts and exhales shakily when she puts her hands on him. The texture of a penis has always been very curious to her, so soft and yet so hard at the same time; wet, but only at the tip. In contrast, vaginas are soft all over, damp and fragrant, warm and enveloping. Penises are…very different.

After thousands of years of vaginas, penises had been quite the adjustment.

“Tell me,” she murmurs, “tell me what you want-”

Han groans in her ear. “Thi- this is ‘nough ‘sele, your hands on me. I won’t last. This- this is-”

She firms her grip, and his voice trickles off.

Later, Han makes breakfast while she battles the coffee maker; inserting little capsules into a machine should not be this difficult.

“Do you have the newspaper?” she asks.

He glances at her and is immediately spattered by oil. Hissing, he sticks his finger into his mouth. “‘pad,” he mumbles around it, “N’york Times. Nuffin’ local, s’not like we can read it.”

Diana is staring at the tiny little manufacturer’s label stuck on the side of the coffee maker. “I can,” she realises.

“Where was that when I was using Google Translate for the lease to this place?” he growls. The coffee maker has started to purr beneath her hand; she is victorious.

Diana crosses the kitchen to kiss him, just because she can. Under the toothpaste he still tastes like her. She remembers to turn off the stove and take the eggs of the heat this time. There had been an incident before where they had forgotten, which had led to a very unimpressed fire brigade and them shopping for a new kitchen.

Han’s incredibly soft hands creep up from her waist to cup her breasts and he tilts his head to put his mouth on her collarbone. His penis needs very little coaxing to emerge from the slit in his underwear and she teases her way down to its base, with its trimmed thatch of hair and heavy testicles.

“Wha’s gotten into you?” he groans, his damp breath washing against her cheek.

She laughs, tilting her throat up for him to set his teeth to. Her nipples are hard, and Han puts his soft fingers to good use: brushing up the line of her jaw, skirting down to tease her clitoris. She can feel herself growing wetter and kicks up onto the kitchen island, using her toes to pinch open a drawer.

“Not you,” she tells him, “not yet.”

She laughs harder at his sputters but unerringly goes for the correct drawer and the tube of lubrication within. She has been using KY jelly for almost a century now.

“I’m not complaining,” he mutters, squeezing the lubrication onto his fingers. “Yet.”

The first inside her is gentle but sure, and she feels a familiar tingle creeping up her spine.

“Another,” she says, and he obeys.

Diana is a god, very possibly the last one left on this mortal plane. Han, despite his ignorance, worships her as if she is the only who’s ever mattered.

There are latex prophylactics in the drawer as well, and she tears the packet open for him when his lubricated fingers slide on the foil. Han swears, and she licks his irritation right from his tongue. He slots himself inside her, and licks her pleasure from her skin.

That evening Han will ask her what she thinks about ‘settling down’, and she can only marvel at the number of euphemisms mankind invents.

“Aren’t we already?” is all she manages in the face of Han’s sputtering blushes. Has she misread all the signs? Has Han been unhappy all this while?

“Gisele, I want more,” he blurts out, “with you.”

She does not know what to think. Their meal is interrupted and she can _act _instead.

A single phone call puts them on a plane halfway around the world. Her mortal frailty is slow to leave her, her grip weak and uncertain as she grapples for the frame of a jeep speeding 160km/h under the blazing afternoon sun. It is surer that night with a strength born of cold fear.

She is not _on _a plane, but she is right _under _one, feet scrabbling in vain as Han desperately tries to pull her up, the silly man. Diana does not recall a time where she has seen him lift anything heavier than a tyre iron. There had been a time where she could pick up a car like this and throw it clear across a runway.

The man is impossible to hear because of the noise, impossible to sense because all of Han’s focus is entirely on her. Only she can see him, creeping up on her…on hers. Han is hers now, like how Etta and Sammy and Charlie and Chief used to be, like how Margaret Elizabeth and Parker and Tony still are.

Diana knows she will survive; Han does not. Nevertheless, it is her choice.

“I love you,” she mouths, and lets go. What she would give for the Lasso of Hestia in this moment, but she supposes a gun will do.

Her last glimpse of Han is of his anguished face, but she can live with that. She will live with that.

She wakes up to an empty field with the realisation that she did to Han what Steve once did to her.

She can understand, a little, why he went off the rails afterward.

* * *

Time ticks inexorably on, and mankind welcomes in the new millennia with copious amounts of fireworks and alcohol. In one of her more bitter moments she thinks mankind has been its own worst enemy more than either Time or War ever have.

She will not go to Hong Kong or Japan for long years yet.

Diana returns to Paris at the turn of the century and finds a job at the museum, dealing with antiquities. In her previous professions she has amassed a great amount of information, not least of all where stolen artefacts have been kept, and methods for restoring them to their rightful places. She believes the layman term is ‘blackmail’.

Diana becomes the Louvre’s most successful retrieval specialist.

And then an ambush occurs in Afghanistan.

Diana breaks into a flat in New York she once called ‘home’. The security system has changed, has been updated, but her knowledge has likewise been changed and updated too. She is just shutting the balcony doors when she hears a click of a gun behind her and a gusty exhalation.

“Goddamnit, Diana, couldn’t you just ring the goddamn doorbell like a normal person?”

She whirls. “Parker?”

He still keeps his hair shorn short, but his scalp is speckled with white. His large hands are as steady as ever as he puts the safety on the gun, and just as gentle when he opens them for an embrace. Most of her strength has returned, and she must remind herself to be extra careful with his old bones.

“It’s good to see you again, Diana,” he tells her in his gravelly rasp.

“I saw the news,” she says, plucking at his sleeves. “Tony- the ambush- Afghanistan-!”

Parker’s face contorts with the strength and mix of his emotions.

“A lot of things have changed,” he warns her. She wishes it didn’t sound so much like a threat. “We’re not in the game anymore, and even then, we don’t command the resources we used to. But there are good people out there keeping the search up. They’ll find him.”

“I’ll find him faster,” she points out.

“Maybe, but give them a chance,” Parker says.

“I can do it!”

“I don’t doubt that, and if anything happens to Tony, I’m not sure I’ll ever forgive myself,” he says. “But I need you more here.”

“Parker,” she realises slowly, “where is Margaret Elizabeth?”

* * *

He still moves about soundlessly, if far slower than she remembers. His knuckles are twisted and swollen with arthritis but are still able to flawlessly assemble a gun from its parts. He has lost much of the muscular bulk of his prime, and has a cane he uses in his daily life.

“I’m one of the lucky ones,” Parker tells her, “healthy as a horse, apart from the arthritis. Physical disabilities are easier to live with, given the choice.”

She thinks of Charlie, long dead, and his ghosts, and does not disagree.

Parker takes her to an institution, very sterile and very precise. Her heart sinks.

“How’s my Pegasus today?” Parker calls, falsely cheerful.

“I am not _your _Pegasus,” a voice retorts thickly. “I am your _wife.”_

“Of course,” Parker moans, “my mistake. Here, I have a present for you.”

Diana thinks that is her cue, but Parker shakes his head very slightly and winks, withdrawing a small glass tube with a gold handle out of his pocket.

“I found a new one yesterday,” he pronounces with relish. “It’s called ‘Lady Balls’.”

“Do you kiss me with that mouth?”

Parker bends over the bed and makes loud, smacking kissing noises. “I kiss our children with this mouth, too.”

Diana bites back a sob as she watches Parker paint so very carefully.

“It’s a good day today, huh,” he says, more to himself than either of them. “It’s your lucky day, Pegs. I got you an extra present. Or, well, this present came and got me.”

“You can’t tease an old girl like that and not give me a clue.”

Parker looks up, and beckons her over.

“Happy Thursday!”

Margaret Elizabeth is pale and worn. The only colour in her face is Parker’s lipstick; even her once-dark eyes are faded with age. They go very large and very round at the sight of her, as does her mouth, tears threatening to well but they do not fall.

“Diana,” Margaret Elizabeth gasps, “Diana!”

She startles at the touch on her wrist but it is just Parker, who nods to her, and silently steps out the door. There are no signs, and there is no one else around. She can’t stand that Margaret Elizabeth is still looking at her as if she were a mirage.

Diana toes off her boots and climbs into bed with her.

The mouth that greets her is smiling wickedly.

“Why, Ms. Prince, I’ll have you know I’m a married woman.”

Diana bursts out laughing. “This is hardly the first time we have been in bed together.” She winks. “I doubt it will be the last, either.”

Margaret Elizabeth laughs with her this time, and they curl towards each other like commas in the narrow hospital bed. The last time they had done this they had looked like sisters, each with dark hair and darker eyes.

“Do you think Parker will fit?”

“Did I ever tell you about Cleo’s Treatises of Bodily Pleasure? There were 12 volumes in total, I read them a long time ago.”

“No, you did not,” Margaret Elizabeth says archly. “Ms. Prince, have you been holding out on me?”

She smiles. “Cleo concluded that while men were necessary for procreation, when it came to pleasure…” Diana shrugs, letting Margaret Elizabeth fill in the blanks herself, and is not disappointed. She is still beautiful when she laughs, after all.

“That may have been how it started,” she allows. “However, for the record, Parker was a very quick learner.”

“Hands-on.”

They burst out laughing again.

“You should know, you were there backseat-driving him through it!”

They laugh even harder.

“How have you been, Diana?” Margaret Elizabeth asks, after they have calmed somewhat and interrupted by a scandalised nurse, who had to be ushered away by Parker.

“I never did thank you for sending me to the Mossad,” she says. “Not to the Mossad, but rather to their mission. It was…good to have a purpose again, even briefly.”

“I would have offered you a place with us if I thought for a second you’d take it,” is the calm reply. “Nevertheless, I’m glad. Etta’s records were…incredible.”

Diana glances at her sharply. “Etta kept records?”

“Personal ones,” Margaret Elizabeth reassures her, “handwritten, which I later burnt after reading. No other copy exists in the world, although I’m quite certain those at the front had their stories. I won’t call them myths, or legends.” She raises a hand, just grazing her face with weathered fingertips.

“You gave them hope out there.”

Her eyes are looking past Diana, at a sight only she herself can see.

“Like your Steve?”

Awareness flickers back into Margaret Elizabeth’s eyes at her question. Slowly, a smile creaks across her mouth.

“Like yours as well. But you did one better, Diana,” Margaret Elizabeth tells her, a beatific look on her face. “You came back.”

* * *

Margaret Elizabeth is recounting a tale about a mission with the Howling Commandos after the Second War, where she had to retrieve the necessary intelligence from the men’s locker room.

“Did you know that the best way of assessing your men’s mission-readiness is by firing a gun at them?”

No, Diana did not (she also does not agree, but she is nitpicking, perhaps).

She is in the middle of receiving an extremely thorough run-down on the quality (or lack thereof) of drawers on the men present in the locker room that day when Margaret Elizabeth just…stops.

“Margaret Elizabeth?” No response. “Peggy? Pegasus? Pegs?” Nothing. Fear sours her previous joviality.

“Margaret Elizabeth!” she tries again, a little more urgently.

Diana is nearly out the door, on the verge of picking up the nearest nurse and carrying them into the room when Margaret Elizabeth smacks her red-painted lips and yawns. Diana is frozen by the door. She knows exactly when Margaret Elizabeth spies her; she had seen that exact same expression on her aged face maybe an hour before.

“Diana? Diana!”

Tears well again but unlike before they fall, and Diana runs to her. She is still in her socking-clad feet.

“Oh, Diana,” Margaret Elizabeth whispers, clutching at her hands with a grip that reminds her that Margaret Elizabeth has worked with guns all her life. “Diana! I thought you’d never come back.”

Diana’s legs are shaking with fear. “Parker,” she whispers, “Parker!”

She hears the door before she hears him.

“Di- oh.”

“Parker!” Margaret Elizabeth cries. “Parker, look who it is. Diana is back. Diana is _home.”_

Guilt paralyses her legs as much as fear does.

“Parker,” she whispers, “I do not understand.”

He is not looking at her, however. All of his attention is on Margaret Elizabeth.

“Yeah,” he says softly, “ain’t she a sight for old eyes, Pegs?”

* * *

“It’s Alzheimer’s,” Parker tells her quietly, after, as they sit on a bench overlooking a beautiful park in full bloom. “She was diagnosed almost 10 years ago.”

“That is what you meant,” she realises, “when you spoke of physical disabilities.”

Margaret Elizabeth does not see ghosts like Charlie used to, but Diana feels like their effect is no less crippling.

Parker nods. “She had a good long run of it. Not a lot of people can say they ran the most preeminent intelligence agency in the world well into their 70s.

“She shoulda called it a day long before then, but you know Pegs,” he shrugs, smiling down at his feet. “Can’t leave anything alone if it ain’t to her exacting standards. Fury was still being groomed.” His smile fades. “You could also say shit went down after that, too.”

Parker doesn’t go into details and Diana does not ask it of him. Those are not the sort of details she is interested in.

“Eventually, we left. We travelled the world, saw it on our own terms this time,” he continues. “We have a lot of pictures; when we get home I’ll take ‘em out and show you. Sharon helped to sync everything onto the Starkpad.”

“Starkpad?” she asks, laughing.

Parker snickers. “Fool boy keeps sending us new gizmos and gadgets, to make sure he keeps ‘em old folk friendly, he says. Sometimes I think he forgets we used those sorta prototypes at SHIELD, too. I’ve got a Starkphone and a Starkpad. The telly is hooked up to Stark TV, and there are too many channels for just little ol’ me.”

“I’ve been using a Nexus,” she admits.

“Don’t let Tony find out,” he says. “He’ll never shut up about it.”

She shrugs. It helps to talk about their darling boy as if he is just around the corner and not still lost in a desert in Afghanistan. “I am a museum curator,” she says. “I deal with antiques.”

Parker bursts out laughing. “Yeah, he’ll get a kick outta that one.” 

* * *

Diana likes to feel like she has made peace with her place in the world.

It is not Themyscira. Even the most picturesque beaches on this mortal plane will never be Themyscira. Still, she has been well-met by warrior women all over the globe, and is eager to see if the rumblings of an elite all-female bodyguard unit somewhere in Africa are true.

She has lost so much: her home, her family, her world, and that was before taking into account her losses among mankind. Those brief bright stars which burnt out all too soon are no less dear to her than the immortal ones who preceded them.

That impermanence is the way of life, generally. When people die, you do not get them back.

Then SHIELD resurrects Steve Rogers, and Diana feels her place in the world shift.

* * *

She hears him before she sees him and pauses, perched not unlike a gargoyle atop the third-storey awning. She could wait or come back another day. Fewer witnesses, fewer explanations, less curiosity. She has been at the Louvre almost 20 years now. The new ones learn quickly never to question.

In the end sentiment overrules logic, and she grips the brick and swings herself through Margaret Elizabeth’s window.

Tony immediately drops into a guard position, his marvellous suit assembling on his hand. But then he catches sight of her, and Diana sees the shock and recognition bleed into his eyes. Those eyes have remained much the same after all these years.

“That’s impossible,” Tony says. _“You’re _impossible.”

“Improbable, perhaps,” she returns, “but hardly impossible. After all, I am right here.”

Margaret Elizabeth smiles at them fondly. “Tony, darling. Did I mention Diana came back to visit?”

He rolls his eyes and drawls, “Nope, that musta slipped your mind, Pegasus.”

As he relaxes, his suit begins disassembling itself piece by piece, and Diana watches it avidly.

“I came back for you, at the start of all that business,” she admits. “I wanted to find you myself, but Parker convinced me otherwise.”

Tony frowns. “Pops?”

Diana glances meaningfully at Margaret Elizabeth.

Tony blinks, eyes briefly going glassy.

“Well, I got outta there just a little under the weather.”

“I am sorry you suffered at all,” she replies.

“It wasn’t all bad,” he says slowly. “There were…lessons that I had to learn.”

“Have you heard the latest news, Diana?” Margaret Elizabeth interrupts. “Tony came by to tell me in person. Apparently SHIELD fished Steve out of the Arctic Circle, still alive, even!”

She frowns. _“That _is impossible. Unless your Steve Rogers is a god?”

Tony barks out a harsh laugh. “If it’s something impossible you want, it’s a god. Nah, Cap is a good ol’ human, just with a little extra.”

“What extra?”

“That’s what everybody wants to know and nobody can find out,” Tony sighs. “They’ve only been trying since they made Cap in the first place, way back when in the 40s.”

“…made?” she repeats hesitantly. “Do not tell me your Steve Rogers is made out of clay and had life breathed into him by a god. I did not think there were any left.”

Tony barks out that same harsh laugh again. “God, Princess, where do you even get these ideas from? Cap was a runt before Erskine and his team got their hands on him. Everything good about him came out of a bottle.”

“Tony.” Margaret Elizabeth’s voice is very small. “Please.”

There is a jigsaw piece missing, a story Diana cannot fully read, between a man who is no longer living and a man everyone believed was no longer living, a piece that links Tony’s disdain of his father and Steve Rogers, and Margaret Elizabeth’s weariness. Margaret Elizabeth and Tony’s father had worked together during the Second War only to never do so again even before Tony had been born.

Instead, Margaret Elizabeth had secreted Tony away for her own, the summers she could. Nonetheless, their stolen time could not negate the lasting effect those 3 other seasons out of a year had on him.

Tony’s father is a shadowy figure to Diana. From what she can gather he had been a man of science and mechanical marvels, much like how Tony is now. And yet Diana cannot and will not forget the marks she had first seen Tony’s small wrist all those years ago. The true marvel has always been Tony, with his adaptive mind and belief in a future for all mankind.

Diana does not doubt that Steve Rogers had been a hero; Margaret Elizabeth’s regard is proof enough. Nonetheless she knows now that heroes are only human, and humans have so many facets to them, can compress them in a bid for ‘the greater good’. To Diana there has only ever been good, and she has always and will always fight for those who slip between the cracks. But a man is not his people, nor do his people make up a man.

With his roots scattered to the winds, Chief stood tall alongside those who had once persecuted and enslaved his people. 

Steve Rogers sacrificed himself to save London, only for his country’s leaders to press a button and destroy millions of lives they would never see.

Diana will withhold her judgment for now, and be glad for the renewed relationships between Margaret Elizabeth and her Steve, and Tony and herself.

Tony huffs and turns away, scrubbing a hand through his hair. “Yeah, whatever,” he mutters, the set of his shoulders tensing. “Who are you anyway, Princess?”

She smiles, and knows exactly how to take Tony’s mind off things. It has been a while since she has last said these words, but they are no less true for all the years between them.

“I am Diana of Themyscira, Daughter of Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons.

“I am a god.”

* * *

And then death spits back Steve Rogers’s brother-in-arms, very much battered and worn, but very much alive. Diana feels herself lose that much more tenuous ground.

* * *

When she finally does meet Steve Rogers, it goes far differently than how she could have ever imagined. Her Tony is quiet and wordless by her side, nursing hurts she cannot see but can feel, acutely. She will not howl her injustice at the world, that they brought the wrong Steve back- 

But she is very tempted to. 

Sharon Carter is nowhere in sight.

Diana has never met Michael Carter, who died before Margaret Elizabeth came into her life. All she knows are the fragments she has pieced together over the years, of a young widow left behind to raise a child alone in a time that was unkind to single mothers, despite the fact of how many there were, and their lack of choice in the matter.

Michael Carter’s nameless widow had been too proud to take the aid Margaret Elizabeth had extended at the time, but William Henry Carter had enlisted in the Royal Air Force at age 18 and found Margaret Elizabeth anyway, and that, as mankind likes to say, was that. Diana has never met Sharon Carter either, but Margaret Elizabeth speaks of her with the same warmth in her voice when speaking of Diana herself, of Tony, of Parker and the children, of Angela Martinelli, and that is enough for her.

“You are Steve Rogers,” she says. Tony’s head shoots up in alarm.

The man turns big blue eyes her way, like a deer in headlights. “Ma’am?”

She smiles at Tony, still sees the little boy she held on her hip once upon a time. He remembers exactly what that tone of voice means.

“You should not have done that to Sharon Carter,” she tells Steve, “or Margaret Elizabeth.

“Margaret Elizabeth believed in accountability. She believed in- perhaps not the mankind of today, but the hope of the future. You took that hope and belittled it.”

Steve Rogers looks gutted by her words; after what he has done, he deserves it. Diana advances on him, merciless.

Tony starts forward. “No, Princess, you really shouldn’t–”

Diana has spent her entire time in this mortal world doing the things men have told her she couldn’t or shouldn’t. This will not be the last of them.

Steve Rogers takes his eyes off her at Tony’s title of address, and that is his undoing. “Princess?”

Tony looks horrified. “Princess!”

She pulls her fist back and punches Steve Rogers in the jaw. The blow throws him back a good 10 metres and into the bole of a tree. Diana is gratified to see that the tree does not break.

Tony gapes. “Don’t mind me, then.”

“Margaret Elizabeth said he could take it.” In the distance, Steve is very slowly crawling onto all fours. “I am glad to see that she was not wrong.”

“Remind me not to piss you off,” Tony says, but he is grinning broadly, even as it pulls at his split lip.

Her own smile fades at the sight, and she raises a hand to touch the side of his face.

“I believe there are many things we will not agree on, and I also believe there are many things that we will. I believe this is a conversation we will continue to have for many years.”

Tony stretches his arms out. He is sun-warmed and heavy with muscle, scented with iron in a way so few humans are these days. She holds him tight and remembers her lost sisters-in-arms.

“I want to see you in your armour one day,” she continues. “I have a few suggestions.”

He grins again. “You know where I live.”

“Didja get the name o’ the truck that hit me?” Steve Rogers groans, propping himself upright with the tree trunk.

“I will not stay,” she says. “I have no interest in speaking to him again anytime soon. He was important to Margaret Elizabeth, and to you; that is why I held him to such high standards.” Diana shakes her head. “I expected better of him.”

Tony raises his eyebrows. “And of me?” He looks…subdued, at her impending disappointment.

“Tony.” She gently cups his face in her hands to press her lips to his brow. “This may be a conversation for another time, but do not think for a moment that I am disappointed. We will disagree, because that is the nature of mankind. Do not think this makes me think any less of you, not even for a second.”

Diana may leave him now, but their parting this time is only temporary. Parker is waiting for her at home; she will not leave him at such a time. 

The Louvre has already received her application for an indefinite sabbatical. Whether they accept it or not is not a concern. 

“I believe the kids these days say ‘ttyl’?” she asks.

“Oh my god, Princess, stop, you’re hurting me,” Tony whines, his voice coloured with laughter. “You don’t actually say those things, you type them.”

“I was teasing, Tony,” she says. “Don’t you remember what that is like?”

“Y’know what, Princess?” he grins. “I’m beginning to, I really am.”

* * *

After all this time, there is just one person from Themyscira whom Diana wants to meet again.

(Her mother does not count; mothers are a law unto their own, and they should never count.)

Menalippe.

Menalippe had been Antiope’s partner, her wife in modern day terms, even if Diana finds that title so…_trite, _for what Antiope and Menalippe had meant to each other. On Themyscira everyone had known they were a package deal. See Menalippe, and know Antiope would not be far behind. See Antiope, and know Menalippe would be close by, even if you never saw her.

When Diana snuck out of bed to train with Antiope, it had been Menalippe who stood guard outside the cave. When her mother eventually found out about said training, Menalippe had left her post to return to Hippolyta’s side and speak reason until the queen had calmed.

Antiope had never been one for tenderness, save for very specific situations, for very specific people. Much of Diana’s fighting style is based on Antiope’s - smash until it breaks, because the world will break before an Amazon does. In contrast, her mother enjoyed spins, and employed her hair and furs and silks in a dizzying whirl; you never saw her blade coming until it was too late.

Menalippe had been- very different. She preferred range weapons: bows, spears, ropes, whips, even a mace, and the infamous battle axe. It leant her body a distinct fluidity that Diana had envied as a child and had tried to emulate as an adult.

Still, for all their proximity, Menalippe and she had never been close, and there had been a time where Diana had feared Menalippe resented her for taking up so much of Antiope’s free time, made worse by Antiope’s uproarious laughter when she’d found out.

It had been a valid fear to Diana then, and to some point even now. She had first worried, when Etta and Tully had invited her into their home, and then again with Margaret Elizabeth and Parker’s open door policy, if she had not been taking advantage of her welcome, and them.

“Menalippe loves you, Diana,” Antiope had reassured her all those years ago, a warm hand on her shoulder for comfort. Kisses and embraces were always her mother’s realm. “You are impossible not to love.”

“Because I am a child,” Diana remembered pouting, “because I am the only child.”

“No,” Antiope had corrected, “because you are the most important person in the world to me, save her.”

“But that is because of you!” Diana had cried, stomping her foot as tears welled in her eyes. “It is not right that Menalippe should love me because you do. If Menalippe does love me, it should be- it should be her choice, and because she wants to. Not because you do,” she had added, feeling utterly miserable at the end of her tantrum.

Antiope had shook her head at her. “I do not know how to reassure you,” she had finally admitted.

“You can’t,” Diana had replied. It had possibly been the only time she had thought something beyond her aunt, at least until the beach.

Menalippe had not come to her, because she was not the type of person who would bend to cajoling. Polyxena, ironically, had been renowned upon the island for her reticence, but Menalippe had not been far behind. Words were something she neither took comfort in nor comforted with.

Instead, Menalippe, Captain of the Guard, had taught her horse tricks.

To both Hippolyta and Antiope, horses had been pets or calvary. To them, fighting on horses had been like fighting without horses, just with height and leverage. Hippolyta had favoured direwolves and Antiope birds of all kinds (the albino peacocks that had terrorised Diana as a child had been her doing).

To Menalippe, however, horses had been her partners.

The Amazons had called Menalippe ‘horse-hearted’ upon Themyscira, and among manking there are no shortage of similar terms. She had had a whole vocabulary of horse sounds that could have a horse kneeling or rearing without ever once raising a hand to them. Slowly, over the years, Menalippe had taught them all to Diana, and because Hippolyta had seen no danger in what she deemed paltry party tricks, no one had batted an eyelid at their time together.

In time, Diana had learnt to read Menalippe, too.

Menalippe, whose body language had not been dissimilar to her beloved horses. Menalippe, who had stood by her mother’s side as long as Antiope, who had wielded the Lasso of Hestia before her. Menalippe, who had loved Antiope, and was loved in return.

Menalippe, who fought on horses because they gave her her best chance to match Antiope and Hippolyta, and had fallen in love with the creatures along the way. Menalippe, who had no words with which to speak her love, so she’d shown it the only way she knew how.

How, then, did Menalippe continue on after losing such a love?

Diana does not bode too long or too often on those she has lost, choosing to keep in mind the ones she still has by her side. But in times of quiet her mind gets very, very loud, and she cannot help but remember.

What would Menalippe’s answer be? Diana cannot begin to fathom. Her Steve was…so very above average in so many ways and his loss pricks her heart even now, but their time together is incomparable to the literal millennia Antiope and Menalippe spent side-by-side.

To have your heart carved out of you, and yet still beat…

Diana remembers the shy toss of Menalippe’s dark hair as she had smiled at Antiope and knows they had been happy.

She will not forget her Steve, or Etty and Tully and their beautiful redheaded babbies, nor Sammy and Chief and Charlie, nor Margaret Elizabeth and Parker, nor Tony, nor Han. She will not forget those who came between them nor those who came before them.

To that end she has worn out her old VHS copy of ‘The Princess Bride’ and replaced it with a digital copy while looking for ghosts in a stranger’s face. Fast cars cause her to turn her face away, and red curls make her pause sometimes.

But Diana still wakes with the sun every morning, eats a hearty breakfast, and cannot help but be excited by the dawn of a new day. She directs her gaze forward, not backwards. 

Was this what peace was meant to be like? 

She will take a turn through the gardens with Parker later, and finally meet Pepper Potts at dinner tonight. Tony had pretended to protest, only to crumble under a _look_. Parker had seen them, and laughed.

…Diana thinks she might finally be happy. 

**Author's Note:**

> This started off as a canon fix-it because it didn't seem right that Steve died. Instead it's been steadily reworked over the past 2 years to the point that Steve Trevor remained dead, Steve Rogers came back to life, and I couldn't decide how to end it. I must have reworked the last 2 paragraphs at least a dozen times at least in a bid that it not sound trite. I hope I succeeded.


End file.
